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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29420814">A Dream of Green</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/pseuds/azurefishnets'>azurefishnets</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Chrono Trigger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(of old age), Gen, Minor Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:27:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,218</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29420814</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/pseuds/azurefishnets</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Robo does more than merely work the fields during his 400-year hiatus from adventuring.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fiona &amp; Robo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Chocolate Box - Round 6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Dream of Green</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siver/gifts">Siver</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fiona hurried out of her house at the sound of the muffled howling, already calling for Marco to get his sword. She brandished her fire poker. It wasn’t much protection, she knew, but the hole in the waste kept getting bigger and the cries of the monsters inside grew ever closer. If she were ever to see her dream of green come true, she had to keep going, keep ensuring the sapling’s survival.</p><p>She and Marco stood together, along with the few farmhands that were nearby. There was no time to send for help; the travelers had come through less than an hour before, told her they were going down into the hole despite her pleading. And now they’d riled up the monsters, it sounded like, and all of her careful work would be lost. She wanted to howl like a monster herself with the frustration of it, but instead, she stood a little closer to Marco and readied her poker as best she could as they waited, first on the quaking sands, and then within the safety of the house.</p><p>By the time the pounding on the door began (really, it was only knocking, she realized later) Fiona was so nervous and worried she rushed forward and threw the door open. The poker descended and collided with a clang. Fiona opened her eyes—when had she shut them?—only to meet a glowing green gaze and a polite, “Please, do not do that, as you will damage my exterior casing.” She dropped the poker and heaved a great sigh of relief as Marco began to laugh.</p>
<hr/><p>A week later she stood on her doorstep in the early dawn before it would get too hot. The metal man—Robo, he’d told her--- toiled in the fields. She’d thought, surely, he’d need rest or he’d need to stop when it got dark, but he worked unceasingly. Her gaze kept getting drawn to those green glowing orbs that served as his eyes—they were so like the color of sunlight through leaves in her dreams.</p><p>She’d blurted out, “It will take centuries to revive the forest. But I hope, one day…” and Robo had answered her call. But what to do with him? How could one hope to make a connection with someone who didn’t eat, didn’t need to rest, and would, apparently, long outlive her and Marco and everyone else they knew?</p><p>She walked over to him in the cool morning light. He worked faster than any human could; at present he was still tilling the land, patiently breaking up the rocky dirt. She sighed. It was so barren. Was there really any hope?</p><p>“Miss Fiona.” She looked up with a start. He was staring at her, and she realized she was in the way of the tiller. Apologizing, she moved out of the way, but he stopped her before she walked too far.</p><p>“Is there something wrong?” he asked her. “I do not mind, but you have watched me every morning.”</p><p>“I just…” Fiona struggled for a moment, then decided to be honest. “We’re very grateful for the help, but I don’t understand what you get out of this.”</p><p>He stared at her for a long beat, gone still. “I do not know what you mean.”</p><p>“<em>That’s</em> what I mean!” she returned, frustrated. “How can you not know? How can you not want <em>something </em>from all this?”</p><p>“Ah. You misunderstand. Or perhaps I do.” She had the impression he would have frowned, if he could have. “Miss Fiona—”</p><p>“Just Fiona, please?” she interrupted him. “There’s just no need for formality when you’ve willingly bound yourself to 400-year servitude.”</p><p>“…Fiona.” He looked up, stare sweeping out over the barren plains. “Would you believe I spent 400 years in far worse surroundings than this? I was not awake for it, but I have seen plains where the very soil leaches the life from those who walk on it. Where the air stings to breathe, so they tell me. Where the sky is perpetually covered in dust and clouds, where the lightning never stops. A land of death.”</p><p>Chilled, she wrapped her arms around herself and stepped back. “Where…where is that?”</p><p>Robo’s eyes dimmed and for a long moment, she wasn’t sure if he’d answer her. “Here. Where you stand.”</p><p>“No, it’s—it’s never been that bad <em>here</em>,” Fiona said, perplexed. “The monsters took the nutrients from the soil but…’</p><p>He shook his head. “It shall not ever be that bad. My…friends and I will ensure it.”</p><p>“I don’t really understand,” Fiona confessed.</p><p>“I am sorry.” He blew out air in what Fiona realized after a startled moment was his version of a sigh. “At the least, I can say it is pleasant to work under this blue sky. It reminds me of far-away times. And I am… pleased to create a land of life.”</p><p>Fiona gave him a dubious stare. “If you say so.” She looked up, only to be confronted with the sight of the travelers standing on the small ridge that passed the house, and there they stood. Chrono, the one that looked like the queen but called herself Marle, and… she blinked, looking back and forth from the one on the ridge to the one beside whom she stood. They were almost identical, although the one with Chrono looked more aged somehow, his golden skin patina’d and pitted with the stress of unknowable years of work.</p><p>Robo waved to Robo, and Fiona laughed weakly. “You really…aren’t from around here, are you?”</p><p>Robo blinked one eye off and on in what Fiona realized after a second was a wink. “I am now.”</p><p>Fiona breathed out a puff of air she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Then thank you again.”</p><p>“Thanks are unnecessary, but you are welcome.”</p>
<hr/><p>The years passed. The slow, patient work of tilling the soil eventually was done, and Robo embarked on a trip down south to the Hero’s Wood to get the fertile soil and wood that were abundant there. He brought back fertilizer from the mayor’s cows, and a small group of curious and amazed townsfolk. They had a little ceremony as Fiona carefully planted her sapling in a cleared space in front of the villa; Robo took a bit of sap and secreted it away. More trees followed quickly. A small altar was built at the sapling, and trees seemed to sprout from the joyful soil like magic as more came to tend them. They all worked on the trees in those years, tending and planting and spreading the seeds.</p><p> Occasionally the frog-hero came through, becoming more dignified with every passing year. He and Robo always nodded to each other in passing, but if they spoke, Fiona never saw it. The frog always seemed busy with his business for the castle. Robo never ceased his given task.</p><p>The trees grew without reservation, and Robo turned from the work of tilling and fertilizing the soil to the more delicate job of pruning and grafting branches from the ever-growing sapling onto the further reaches of the field. Every year, they held a celebration for the new trees, and Robo would take a rare day off. He would sit with the children and tell them stories of green, of the world that could be, of the world that had once been. The children grew with the forest. Marco’s hair went gray, then white, and Fiona had to begin using a cane. And yet Robo stayed, patient as ever, working ever diligently.</p><p>One chilly afternoon—they’d begun to feel the seasons now that the trees were beginning to grow thick—Fiona came to find Robo in the far reaches of the forest. She moved slowly now, and one of the young ones who tended the altar supported her arm. She found him carefully clearing two trees that had grown too close to each other.</p><p>“Robo, could you come back to the villa for a little while?” She smiled at him, long since having gotten used to the strangeness of his metal face.</p><p>“If you wish. May I ask why?”</p><p>“You’ll see when we get there!” Fiona clapped her hands, girlish again in her glee. She allowed him to escort her back; his metal skin was warm under her fingers. Marco waited at the villa and he brought them both in. Together, with pride, they showed Robo a carving of himself. He examined it, puzzled. It was made of wood and had tiny greenstone chips to represent his eyes.</p><p>“It is very nice.”</p><p>“Marco made it,” Fiona said, beaming with pride in her husband.</p><p>“Indeed, his skill with carving is very good,” the robot agreed. “There are many such small carvings at the forest altar.”</p><p>“But none of them are from <em>our</em> forest,” Fiona said. “<em>This</em> is wood from that very first sapling, and the stone is from the hole you cleared away all those monsters from all those years ago. It’s just to thank you.”</p><p>“I have said many times that thanks are unnecessary.” Robo’s eyes dimmed for just a moment, but he continued, “Nevertheless, I shall treasure this gift.”</p><p>“Robo…” Marco looked uncertain. “We won’t…be here forever. You know that, right?”</p><p>“Of course, Marco,” Robo agreed. “It was agreed at the outset of my service that I would be here to carry on when you were gone.”</p><p>Marco looked relieved; he’d never been sure how much Robo understood human mortality and he and Fiona had had a few conversations about it.</p><p>“What will you do when we’re gone?” Fiona asked, wondering. “The forest grew so much faster than I thought it would. It would live without any of the three of us at this point.”</p><p>Robo looked as thoughtful as a blank metal face can. “I suspect I will continue to do as I have done for the last fifty years,” he said at last. “Grow the forest, continue to make the surrounding lands arable, and work with the townfolk to teach them how to maintain the forest when my friends come to pick me up.”</p><p>“I don’t think any of us can imagine this place without you in it anymore,” Marco said.</p><p>“It has become as close to a home as any I have known,” Robo said. “But eventually, I must leave. I have already made plans to make my exit when the time comes.”</p><p>Fiona placed a hand on his shoulder, wondering, “Will it truly be so easy for you? Have you made no connections here?”</p><p>Robo’s voice was even and calm. “I have. And I understand, perhaps better than most, that I shall never truly leave this time and place.”</p><p>Fiona remembered a day long past and asked, “Because of the other Robo I saw that day?”</p><p>“Well, yes, that was…proof, if you will, that I can be both in one place and time and another all at once,” Robo agreed. “Wave and particle, I suppose.”</p><p>“Huh?”</p><p>“Never mind,” he said. “Thank you very much for the carving, Fiona, Marco. It is good that you are my friends.”</p>
<hr/><p>More years went by. The altar had expanded to a small shrine. Fiona wasn’t sure what to make of that, but she, too, had taken up the habit of praying in front of the tree for peace in all times. When she looked up, the sunlight filtered through leaves all around and shimmered like green glass.</p><p>Robo found her there, on her last day. She sat cradled by the roots, no longer strong enough to stand, and Marco knelt with her. She looked up at him, eyes gone cloudy with age, and smiled.</p><p>“I think this is it, Robo,” she said. “Come and take a rest with me.”</p><p>Robo carefully settled at her side. “You are going?”</p><p>“Yes, I think so,” she said, her voice cheerful, although it had become quieter and more raspy with age. “But it’s good to know my life’s work will be in good hands when I leave.”</p><p>“Yes. I will ensure that for you.” Robo’s eyes dimmed.</p><p>“Are you…sad?” Fiona said, peering at him. “I’d thought this would be another day like any other for you, somehow.”</p><p>Robo’s voice, when he spoke, was quiet and measured. “I will miss you. I could have done none of this without you.”</p><p>“Oh, the feeling is mutual,” Fiona said. “Do you know, when I first saw you, I thought your eyes were like sunlight through leaves? It was just a brief vision, but…”</p><p>Robo swung his head from side to side in negation. “It is merely the glow of the power cells that fuel me,” he said.</p><p>“It was…an omen,” Fiona said, “and it was the most blessed event of my life.” She reached her hand to the sun, fingers trembling as she grasped the light, and let the shadows flicker on Robo’s face so his eyes gleamed.</p><p>“Someday you will leave too, although not in the way that I do,” she said, voice growing ever fainter. “But until that day, thank you, thank you, thank you.”</p><p>Robo said, “I’ve told you many times that thanks are not required…”</p><p>Fiona shook her head. “Not for the forest, nor for your work, but for your friendship. For the omen. Thank you…for being my dream of green.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Happy Chocobox! I hope you enjoyed the read!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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